What Ever Happened to Pierre Poujade?

The article briefly recapped his adult life: fleeing from the Nazis and
joining the Free French forces, where the British Royal Air Force trained him
as a pilot… then, after a stint doing door-to-door book sales, he “saved
enough to open his own bookshop back home in Saint Cere, in the Lot department
of South West France”:

There Poujadism was born, on 23 July 1953.
The dreaded tax inspectors were due, and those traders to be subjected to a
control — a fearsome trawl through every last centime in their
accounts — shivered in their back rooms. The discovery of the most piffling
abuse or inadvertent error, and the victim would be “strangled, garrotted,
ruined”. Poujade clutches his neck and feigns the agony involved.

Poujade was a member of the town council, and his communist adversary came
puffing along on his bike. He was to be inspected. What was to be done?
“Well,” said Poujade, “they’ll put you through the
moulinette and it will be me next. We must leave our knives
in the cloak-room and tackle this together.” And thus was organised the first
show of resistance.

“I became the spokesman because even then I had the reputation of being a big
mouth,” he chuckles. On inspection day he sounded the tocsin on the church
bell, and the tax collectors arrived to find the whole village, including the
curé, in the street. They filled the communist’s shop and
refused to let him produce his accounts, even if he had wanted to.

“But,” cried the collectors, “l’administration [you have to
have lived in France to understand the resonance of that octopoid being
invoked against you] has decided that all the tax controls of the Lot will be
done by the end of the month.”

“Tell the administration,” roared the 33-year-old Poujade, “that you have
already finished. There will be no more controls.”

That first phase, he says now, ‘that was real Poujadism — everyone
shoulder-to-shoulder.” They had ras-le-bol — which means
they had had it up to there: the ras-le-bol factor, always
present in French life, was the foundation of his movement, enabling him to
lead the only meek and quiescent French class of small traders and
businessmen to open revolt.

A year later Poujade could stalk the country end to end among nearly a
million members of his Union for the Defence of Shopkeepers and Craftsmen. He
made the wonky Fourth Republic government tremble and panic; he led a march
on Paris and filled the Vélodrome d’Hiver, then the biggest arena in Paris
with more than 20,000 seats, to overflowing for his speeches.

“If they don’t change the law, we’ll change the government” was the slogan,
and the government believed it. Many concessions were granted, and, for a
brief, heady time, the Poujadists held the administration in thrall.
Préfets did nothing without consulting them, ministers would
not visit a region without their permission.

“Of course,” he says staidly, “it could not last — it was a state within a
state.” He could have led 10,000 armed war veterans down the Champs Elysées,
but he seems to have had no real taste for grabbing power, preferring
democracy. In the 1956 elections his movement
won 53 seats and polled two and a half million votes.

“Poujadism is not a political party; it has no philosophy, no doctrine, no
religious affiliation. It is a movement for economic survival by little
people harassed by the fisc… all kinds of people — Catholics, Muslims, Jews,
Protestants, atheists, communists, and populism, pure and simple. Nothing to
do with Right or Left.”

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